A reconfigurable integrated circuit device comprises a plurality of processing elements and a network for connecting these processing elements, and responding to an external or internal event, a sequencer sets configuration data, which is data for configuring a circuit, in the processing elements and the network, and the processing elements and the network configure any computing state or an arithmetic circuit according to this configuration data. A conventional general programmable microprocessor reads instructions stored in a memory in order, and processes the instructions sequentially. Since the hardware configuration of the microprocessor is standardized, the processor must execute programs combining limited instructions in order to perform various different processings, therefore decreasing the processing time has a certain limitation.
The reconfigurable integrated circuit device, on the other hand, comprises: a plurality of processing elements having a plurality of types of arithmetic circuits, including an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) having a computing function, such as an adder, a multiplier and a comparator, a delay circuit and a counter; and a network which connects the processing elements. If the plurality of processing elements and the network are configured into a desired configuration using configuration data, a desired computation is executed in this computing state. If data processing in one computing state completes, another computing state is constructed by another configuration data, and different data processing is executed in this state.
By switching configuration data like this, a different computing state is dynamically configured, and operation of a virtually large circuit is executed by time-division. Since each processing element is a dedicated hardware circuit, processing is faster than the case of a microprocessor executing a program. A reconfigurable integrated circuit device is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2010-244238, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-274397 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-11924.